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Wednesday, 20 July 2011

Power Speaking Music Videos Continued

We're now up to day 8, and the projects are nearing completion. The recording phase continued for several classes (each one hour). Many of the groups did multiple re-takes to get exactly the right scene recorded. I am getting tired of hearing these songs played in 5-second intervals over and over again

The editing stage will be next, and here's how it's set up:

Materials and Equipment
1. Book your lab or have one student from each group bring in their laptop for their group to use.
2. Movie Maker 2.6 or the Mac or Linux equivalent. You can download it from here and install it on both Vista and 7 Windows systems...it's a much better tool than what is shipped with those versions.
3. Pazera Video Conversion Suite - free, powerful, and easy to use. Convert mp4 to avi in a jiffy. Download it here.
4. Headphone splitters (from the Dollar Store)
5. Power Bars
6. A couple of USB drives/thumb drives (small ones are okay - the files are tiny)
7. You may need to download DivX codecs as well as K-Lite Codecs onto a USB drive if Movie Maker doesn't play your converted videos correctly (on the K Lite page, click on "mirror 1" or "mirror 2" to start the download) They are easy to install on student laptops if needed.

The Process
1. Set up your power bars so your students can get their laptops powered up. My room has very few useful plugs, so all our power bars have very long cords on them.
2. Give each group one of the headphone splitters and ask them to plug in their own headphones so the room doesn't fill with multiple songs at the same time .
3. Download copies of Movie Maker 2.6 and Pazera VCS and put them both on a couple of USB drives prior to class. Share these with the students so they can quickly get the software and get it installed on their laptops.
4. I very quickly went around and showed each group how to use Pazera to batch convert their mp4 vids from the Flip cameras to the avi flavour that Movie Maker prefers.
5. Students imported all their converted videos into Movie Maker and then muted the audio on all of them Some of these students had dozens of short videos, so this took them a while! They also imported their song into Movie Maker to use to help them time their videos to the song.
6. Once finished, students will save and export their final movies (we're not here quite yet - see the note below) and I'll share them with our school community and possibly chuck them into my Dropbox as well.
7. Three of my students needed the codecs, five of them didn't - no obvious connection to the type of operating system, so it was good I had those codecs available for quick installation!